Mother tongue

Mother tongue education?

Mother tongue education is the idea that a learner is taught the fundamental concepts of a topic in their first language.  Once they learn these concepts they can easily reapply them to an English education stream.  The idea being that children absorb concepts easily in their own familiar languages and can gain a fundamental understanding of them.  But in a second language they simply become words that are learnt, but not absorbed. If you where to create two groups of students both learning a topic such as Math’s or Science, one group learning in their mother tongue and the other in a second language. The group that learnt the fundamentals in their mother tongue will have a better grounding or fundamental understanding of the subject than those who learnt it in a second language.  This is true even if the mother tongue learners change to being taught in the second language later in the experiment.  Clearly it is extremely important that the grounding of learners be made in their mother tongue if they are to reach their full potential.